Tonight the notebook is open and Ireland is breathing against my shoulder and the poems have a reader and the reader has a sharp tongue and freckled hands and a scar that matches mine in a different register.
Tomorrow Falk walks into the rehab center. So does Ireland. The notebook can wait. The safety cannot.
12
IRELAND
The morning after a man opens his notebook is a different kind of morning.
My body carries the evidence of last night in the muscles and the joints, in the low, pleasant ache that reminds me Boone Aldridge's hands are as focused in bed as they are on a patient. The iron headboard lingers under my fingers.
Last night lives in my skin: the poems about my hands and a dead man's pulse on the same page, the laugh I pulled out of Boone by critiquing his rhyme scheme, his expression afterward like I'd passed a test he didn't know he was giving.
The scar on my right shoulder catches when I reach for the top shelf of the supply cabinet at the rehab center, and the familiar pull grounds me in the work.
I lost the pool. I built this. The woman who stands in this facility every morning earned the right to stand here through months of physical therapy and a DPT program and a refusal to let one failure become the entire story.
Falk is already at station three when I arrive, running pre-session checks on a resistance machine. She looks up and gives me a nod, professional and unremarkable.
"Ran the pre-checks on one through six," she says. "Everything's tracking clean."
"Thanks, Falk."
My hands are steady and my smile is the smile I give her every morning, and underneath both I am counting the hours until Rivera's case is complete and this woman is removed from the facility where my patients recover.
Dawes is my first session. He's in good spirits, his recovery metrics climbing now that his benchmarks are corrected and his medications are clean.
His improvement is visible in posture and jaw and the way he attacks the resistance machine with the competitive edge of a young operator who has been told his body was never failing him and has decided to hold that promise with both hands.
"Resistance felt smoother yesterday," he says, adjusting the harness. "Less grinding in the movement."
"That's your body responding to the corrected protocol. Give it another week and the progress should accelerate." I position him and check the calibration display. The numbers are correct. "You keep showing up like this and I'm going to run out of things to fix."
"That's the goal, isn't it?"
"The goal is to put me out of a job. Every patient who walks out of here fully recovered is another nail in my employment coffin." The grin I give him is real, and the warmth underneath it is the part of this work that keeps me standing in this facility even after everything I've learned about what's been happening inside it. "Now give me a slow negative through full range. Less grinding, more data."
He works the rep. The machine hums. The resistance curve tracks his effort in a smooth line.
Routine. And routine in this facility has become a thing I no longer trust.
Hewitt is next. I walk him to station four and check the machine settings against my protocol.
The number on the resistance display is wrong.
A subtle wrong, not visible on a casual glance. The resistance threshold on the grip attachment has been shifted upward by a margin that would put more force through Hewitt's healing radius than the bone and hardware can handle.
And the change is recent. The access log on the machine shows an entry from earlier this morning, before I arrived.
The margin between Hewitt's radius holding and his radius fracturing again is the margin between the calibration I set yesterday and the calibration someone changed this morning, and the gap is narrow enough to make my throat close.
"Hewitt, hold on." My voice comes out calm. "Machine's being temperamental. Give me a second."
"Temperamental." He flexes his hand, testing the grip. "Like my ex."
"Your ex didn't come with a calibration menu. Lucky you." My fingers move through the settings and restore the correct resistance.
The banter covers the fury the way water covers rock: smoothly, completely, while the thing underneath stays exactly where it is.
